UDF fires age barb at Cong

ZODIN SANGA

Aizawl, April 4: With just four days to go for election to the lone Lok Sabha seat from Mizoram, the eight-party United Democratic Front (UDF) alliance, the main rival to the Congress, has fired the age barb at the 129-year-old party.

In a veiled attack on Congress candidate C.L. Ruala, who is 79, UDF chairman R. Lalthangliana today said the older MPs have made Parliament a laughing stock.

“The older MPs who are not conversant with modern technology are creating a mess in the Lok Sabha and are making Indian democracy a laughing stock globally,” the former state minister said.

Lalthangliana clarified he was not criticising senior citizens as a whole. “The MPs who are past their prime are not only useless but create disturbances in the House. It is the older MPs who are under-educated and technologically handicapped, who do not follow etiquettes in the House,” the Mizo National Front leader said.

“In fact, there are some old-timers in Parliament who have a great deal of experience. Ruala has done very little for Mizoram despite his experience. Considering these facts, the UDF has fielded 47-year-old Robert Royte, who is a technocrat, highly-educated and has vast experience in project engineering,” he said.

“The Congress, too, has woken up and made 44-year-old Rahul Gandhi its main contender for the post of the Prime Minister. In stark contrast, the Mizoram Congress has re-nominated a 79-year-old man to represent the state in the Lok Sabha, which is an insult to the people and the younger generation in particular,” Lalthangliana said.

To counter the Congress’s “anti-Christian” tag given to the BJP-led NDA, which the UDF supports, Lalthangliana claimed the community had faced more persecution under Congress rule.

“Christians have suffered severe persecution in Odisha in 1967 and in Madhya Pradesh in 1968 during Congress rule. It was the Congress in Arunachal Pradesh that passed the Anti-conversion Bill in 1978, which Christians call the ‘Satan’s Bill,’” he said.